18/11/2025
🎼 Broadcasting today at 20:00 CET: The Lake Radio x Seismograf presents selected audio papers.
Ania Mauruschat: “The Heartbeat of the Drum. On the sonic agency of the Inuit Qilaat in the decolonization of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).” An audiopaper published on Seismograf 2023, vol. 30. as a part of the series ‘What Sounds Do’.
For over 4000 years, the Inuit in Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is called in Greenlandic, have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic. Their knowledge of how to survive under such harsh conditions has been preserved and passed on via sound through the millennia. For the Inuit, storytelling and frame drum singing and dancing have sonic agency. They give them the energy they needed to survive and thrive in the cold. The powers of these sounds and their misconception by missionaries and colonizers as addressing pagan or even evil forces led to the ban of the qilaat, the Inuit frame drum, from churches and public spaces. After the suppression of these sounds for around 300 years, in December 2021 Inuit drum dancing and singing has been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But despite this huge acknowledgment, the fight for the revitalization of the qilaat is far from over, as the case of the Greenlandic ex-priest Markus E. Olsen shows.